PRISONERS: Ticklish Job

A wag remarked that the Communist commanders had opened a second front in Korea—in the U.N.'s prison stockades. It was too close to the truth to be funny. Brigadier General "Bull" Boatner, Koje Island's tough new boss, seemed to be gaining in his battle with the prisoners—slowly, and not without bloodshed. Boatner's big test would come when the new 500-man enclosures were completed, and the ticklish job was started of transferring the prisoners from the big compounds—probably this week or next.

Standing on a table to welcome a contingent of Canadian troops, Boatner advised them not to kill unless absolutely necessary: "If you get into a fight [with a prisoner], slash him, use the butt of your rifle, give him the knee in the groin."

For the first time since the Dodd kidnaping, Boatner sent troops into one of the hard-core compounds. The North Korean officers of Compound 66 had built two corrugated tin huts which they seemed to be using as a command post and medical dispensary. After a tear-gas barrage had driven prisoners back from the wire, unarmed British troops in jaunty green berets went in, under the protection of U.S. guards with bayonets at the ready, and smashed the huts with axes, hatchets, sledges, crowbars. Nobody got hurt, but next day a prisoner work detail from Compound 96, carrying sewage buckets on poles, stopped at the corner of Compound 85 as if to exchange messages through the wire. When U.S. guards tried to get the detail moving again, a prisoner charged one of the Americans with his three-inch-thick pole. The guard shot him dead. When other prisoners rushed up with their poles, the same guard shot down six.

This week, General Boatner put an end to one annoying Communist practice. A company of U.S. infantrymen, wearing gas masks and wielding bayonets, charged into an enclosure, formed a ring around a 50-ft. Communist flagpole to keep prisoners away while a tank battered down the pole. The infantrymen burned five insulting banners and then marched out again.